rjb is a bridge software. It connects Ruby and Java.

You can write regular expressions some different ways, e.g. /regex/ and %r{regex}. For examples, look here.

Remember that it is always a good idea to match a regex visually first.

Characters

Literal Characters

[ ] \ ^ $ . | ? * + ( )

Character Classes

[ae]            matches a and e, e.g. gr[ae]y => grey or gray => but NOT graay or graey
[0-9]  ...

popthis is awesome when used with inaction_mailer.

Setup inaction_mailer

Install the gem:
sudo gem install popthis

Start the server:
popthis tmp/sent_mails/ # e.g. the folder containing the .txt-mails generated by inaction_mailer

Now, configure your mail client as follows:
Server: localhost
Protocol: POP3
Port: 2220
Username: anything
Password: anything

Capybara does not play nice with sites that have some actions protected by SSL, some not. A popular way to implement this in Rails is using the ssl_requirement plugin by DHH, which redirects a requests from HTTP to HTTPS if the requested action requires SSL and vice versa.

Capybara follows the redirect, but seems to forget the changed protocol for the next request. The only hack-free workaround right now is to use URLs in lieu of paths everywhere (links, form actions).

For a hackful fi...

Our awesome collection of rspec helpers (formerly known as "spec_candy.rb") is now available as a gem. It works, it is tested and there will be updates.

Usage

Add rspec_candy to your Gemfile.

Add require 'rspec_candy/helpers' to your spec_helper.rb, after the rspec requires.

List of features

See on GitHub

YARD 0.6 adds the ability to serve documentation for gems as well as the current project with yard server. Just like gem server in RubyGems, you can serve gem docs. The advantage to YARD’s server is that you don’t need to pre-generate the static docs (with a gem install) before running the server. If you installed your gem with --no-rdoc, YARD will just generate it on the fly!

Ruport’s acts_as_reportable module provides support for using ActiveRecord for data collection. You can use it to get a Ruport::Data::Table from an ActiveRecord model. This cheatsheet covers the basic functionality of acts_as_reportable and some common use cases.

Try our Apify gem which solves many problems you will be having.

home_run is an implementation of ruby’s Date/DateTime classes in C, with much better performance (20-200x) than the version in the standard library, while being almost completely compatible.

When you get this while installing the raspell gem:

ERROR:  Error installing raspell:  
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

You need some libraries:

sudo apt-get install libaspell-dev

When you get this error:

No word lists can be found for the language "de".

An aspell dictionary is missing. Install it with

sudo apt-get install aspell-de

A fake filesystem. Use it in your tests.

Ancestry is a gem/plugin that allows the records of a Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord model to be organised as a tree structure (or hierarchy). It uses a single, intuitively formatted database column, using a variation on the materialised path pattern. It exposes all the standard tree structure relations (ancestors, parent, root, children, siblings, descendants) and all of them can be fetched in a single sql query. Additional features are STI support, named_scopes, depth caching, depth constraints, easy migration from older plugins/gems, integrit...

We built cucumber_spinner to have a progress bar for Cucumber features, which also outputs failing scenarios as soon as they fail.

Installation

gem install cucumber_spinner

Usage

cucumber --format CucumberSpinner::ProgressBarFormatter

If you use CucumberSpinner::CuriousProgressBarFormatter and a feature fails, the according page will show up in your browser.

Note that if you run your Cucumber tests using the [cuc](https://makandracards.com/makandra/1277-a-nicer-way-to-...

To test concurrent code, you will need to run multiple threads. Unfortunately, when you use blocking system calls (e.g. locks on the database), Ruby 1.8 threads won't work because system calls will block the whole interpreter.

Luckily you can use processes instead. fork spins off a new process, IO.pipe sends messages between processes, Process.exit! kills the current process. You will need to take care of ActiveRecord database connections.

Here is a full-fledged example:

describe Lock, '.acquire' do

  before :each do
  ...

rspec_spinner is a progress bar for RSpec which outputs failing examples as they happen (instead of all at the end).

Installation

gem install rspec_spinner

Usage

script/spec -r rspec_spinner -f RspecSpinner::Bar -c

To make a shortcut in your .bashrc

alias ss='script/spec -r rspec_spinner -f RspecSpinner::Bar -c'

There's also an alternate runner RSpecSpinner::Spinner which shows a spinner and the name of the current spec instead of a progress bar.

Install gem and plugin

sudo gem install parallel
script/plugin install git://github.com/grosser/parallel_tests.git

Adapt config/database.yml

test:
  database: xxx_test<%= ENV['TEST_ENV_NUMBER'] %>

Create test databases

script/dbconsole -p
CREATE DATABASE `xxx_test2`;
...

Generate RSpec files

script/generate rspec

(you'll probably only let it overwrite files in script/)

Prepare test databases...

To parse XML-documents, I recommend the gem nokogiri.

A few hints:

• xml = Nokogiri::XML("<list><item>foo</item><item>bar</item></list>") parses an xml string. You can also call Nokogiri::HTML to be more liberal about accepting invalid XML.
• xml / 'list item' returns all matching nodes; list item is used like a CSS selector
• xml / './/list/item' also returns all matching nodes, but .//list/item is now an XPath selector
  • XPath seems to be triggered by a leading ....

• sudo gem install gettext --no-ri --no-rdoc
• sudo gem install fast_gettext --no-ri --no-rdoc
• script/plugin install git://github.com/grosser/gettext_i18n_rails.git (didn't work as gem)
• environment.rb: see code example at the bottom
• if this is your first translation: cp locale/app.pot locale/de/app.po for every locale you want to use
• use method "_" like _('text') in your rails code
• run rake gettext:find to let GetText find all translations used
• translate messages in 'locale/de/app.po' (leave msgstr blank and ms...

How it works

See the lemonade descriptions.

Unfortunately, the gem has a few problems:

• it does not work with Sass2
• it always generates all sprites when the sass file changes, which is too slow for big projects
• it expects a folder structure quite different to our usual

All these problems are solved for us, in our own lemonade fork. This fork has since been merged to the original gem, maybe we can use t...

When you need to patch an existing gem, one way is to "vendor" the gem by copying it into the vendor/gems directory of your Rails project. You can then make any changes you require and Rails will use the vendored version of the gem after a server restart. Unfortunately you need to perform some additional steps to marry Rails and the copied gem. This notes describes what to do.

With Bundler

This is super-painful. If you just copy the gem to vendor/gems, Rails will complain:

Unpacked gem foolib in vendor/gems has no s...